Column

Eclipse season, a Capricorn new year and Venus in Scorpio

"Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you." This column was written over the first days of a January, as a resolution to watch the actual sky every day instead of writing yearly sign forecasts. The three subjects it picked are the ones that come around every winter.

The power of eclipses

Eclipses come in seasons, two or three in a row about every six months, and people still worry about what omens they carry. The practical point is different: eclipses repeat. The same eclipse degree returns roughly every 19 years, so the solar eclipse of early January 2011 at 13 degrees of Capricorn echoed the change of year in 1991 and 1992, December 1972 and January 1973, and December 1953 and January 1954. If you were born within a day or two of one of those dates, that degree is your prenatal eclipse, and the next return of it tends to mark a visible step in your life. Oprah Winfrey, born in January 1954, launched her own television network on exactly such a return.

Mother Nature usually reveals her power around eclipse seasons too: floods in Australia, snowstorms on the east coast of North America and devastating rain in California all arrived with that particular pair of eclipses. Weather is not a horoscope, but the extremes do cluster.

Embracing change: the Sun in Capricorn

Every year at this time the Sun travels through Capricorn, the sign of career, obligations, reality and working toward goals slowly and steadily with a clear plan. The old meaning fits the northern winter: no crops to grow, so you live on what you harvested and made in the autumn. The modern version is the cold shower of the credit card bills and the tax slips arriving in January.

Which makes the Sun in Capricorn the ideal time for annual plans. Only five of them. You should be able to count your goals on the fingers of one hand, and Capricorn friends will insist on it. Earth is at perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, in the first days of January; the days are lengthening since the solstice; Epiphany on the 6th closes the holiday season in half of Europe. Reality meets inspiration. Make the resolutions for yourself, not for anyone else, and keep them short.

Venus lingering in Scorpio

The third subject is the one with the long cycle. In most years Venus crosses a sign in about four weeks. Every eight years, when its retrograde period falls in Scorpio, it stays there for roughly four months, from September to early January. That happened in 2010, again in 2018, and the next long Venus in Scorpio runs through the autumn of 2026. Four months is long enough to find out what is truly important in a relationship, a friendship or a purchase, and the final days of the stay are when the resolve to act on it usually arrives. At the end of such a period Venus is a morning star, visible an hour before sunrise in the south-east, reaching its greatest distance from the Sun.

Why read the sky daily at all

Astrology is much more than the daily, monthly and yearly horoscopes. Each of us has a unique chart with planets, houses and the web of connections between them, and the transits above are only interesting because they touch something in that chart. Most of us wander through life on autopilot, following the beaten path. Watching the actual sky, with an astronomy calendar on the wall if that helps, is a cheap way to stop and choose. When we make choices about life, we get better at life.

This page is an edited version of the daily column published on Astrologically Speaking in January 2011. The three themes and the examples are from the original; dated references have been generalised and the Venus cycle brought forward.